A Vampire's Obsession (Part 1) by Kirby Cooper

Author:Kirby Cooper [Cooper, Kirby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-03-30T22:00:00+00:00

Jack leaned his head against the gray, steel locker in the locker room. God, what a day. Twelve straight hours of observing while Dr. Jerry MacAvoy, the other lead neurosurgeon on staff, performed surgery on a traumatic brain injury dealt to a teenage boy by his abusive, alcoholic father when the man had taken a brick and thrown it at his kid’s head. And all of the interns in the observation window had been just unbearably, impossibly loud, and joking about whether Jerry would be able to pull off perfect stitches or not, until Jack had shouted at them to shut the hell up. Oh, how he hated them. How he hated himself, and the fatal mistake he’d made weeks ago that kept him from doing the one thing he was good at.

It had been a big surgery. The kind that could have made him into an even bigger bigwig in the neurosurgery world if Jack had been successful. The patient had been a 32-year old male. The picture of perfect health, except for the fact that he was paralyzed down his entire left side, due to an enormous tumor growing from the base of his skull. The patient’s brainstem and cranial nerves — the nerves for hearing, movement, sensation for the face, and for swallowing and talking — had been stretched over this malignant mass. Jack had never seen such a large petroclival meningiom, except in textbooks. Neither had the rest of St. Matt’s. The observation room had been standing room only on the morning of the operation. Just before entering the operating room on a gurney, the patient had grabbed his arm, looked at him with intensely blue eyes, and said, “If you can’t get all of it, let me go.” And Jack, arrested by the man’s fervor, had leaned down until their faces were close, and said, “I promise.”

The first three hours of the operation had been absolutely perfect surgery, some of the best he’d ever done. Interns and fellow doctors had applauded him from the observation window, and his attending team looked at him with awe. Removing the tumor had been slow going – by midnight, after 15 hours of operation, Jack had gotten most of the tumor and the cranial nerves remained miraculously undamaged. He’d felt like a hero, like a god. He took a cigarette break every few hours, Mendelssohn blasting through the speakers (his favorite operating music of choice). Finally, there was one last sliver of tumor left. He should have left it alone. He should have taken a break. Anything. But Jack wanted to get the entire tumor out. He’d promised the patient. He’d promised himself. As he’d started removing the very last piece of the tumor, he tore a small perforating branch off the basilar artery. A spurt of horrible red arterial blood began pumping into the air like a fountain. Jack knew then that he’d made a catastrophic mistake. He was able to stop the blood loss, but the damage to the brainstem was horrific and permanent.

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